Re: docs: warn about post-data-only schema dumps with parallel restore.

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>

From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: "David G. Johnston" <david.g.johnston@gmail.com>
Cc: vaibhave postgres <postgresvaibhave@gmail.com>, pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Date: 2026-03-29T18:33:44Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers

Attachments

"David G. Johnston" <david.g.johnston@gmail.com> writes:
> On Sun, Jan 25, 2026 at 10:23 PM vaibhave postgres <
> postgresvaibhave@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Following up on the discussion in [1] about pg_restore failing to restore
>> post-data items due to circular foreign key deadlocks.
>> I’m attaching a doc patch that adds a warning about using post-data-only
>> schema dumps together with parallel restore.

> Not a fan of the patch overall though.  I'd want to add something to
> pg_restore noting that use of --jobs for constraint restoration needs
> schema information to compute the restoration order.

Yeah, dropping this into the list of options is bad.  We put caveats
like that into the Notes section usually.

I also tend to think that it'd be better to document this under
pg_restore: when people run into this type of failure, they are going
to go to the pg_restore docs not the pg_dump docs to understand it.
I guess there could be a case for repeating the info in both the
pg_dump and pg_restore pages, but that feels a bit verbose.

So maybe like the attached?

			regards, tom lane

Commits

  1. Doc: warn that parallel pg_restore may fail if --no-schema was used.